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Jonah Lehrer on Pot in LA
You might remember that last week I pointed to Jonah Lehrer on Mirror Neutrons and porn. This week he’s guest posting for Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish. His debut post yesterday was instigated by this LA Times story on the normalization of pot. Jonah says pot may one day be the new Prozac:
I recently moved to Los Angeles and I'm still adjusting to all the medical marijuana stores – there are two within a mile of my apartment. And it's not just the dispensaries, with their parking lots full of fancy cars – it's the Amsterdamesque attitude. Light up a joint and people ask for a hit; light up a cigarette and they give you a dirty look.
My hunch is that the normalization of marijuana is here to stay. In recent years, there's been increasing interest among scientists in cannabinoid receptors, which are the cell receptors activated when you inhale some THC, the active ingredient in marijuana. (There's a grand scientific tradition of naming cell receptors after the drugs that activate them, which is why you also have opiate receptors and nicotinic receptors. For some still mysterious reason, a chemical in the tropical shrub cannabis sativa is able to perfectly mimic our natural neurotransmitters. As Roger Nicoll, a neuroscientist at UCSF, puts it: “The brain makes its own marijuana.” Smoking a joint just helps you make more of it.) While these cannabinoid receptors have been targeted for the treatment of a wide variety of ailments and disorders, from obesity to chronic pain, I think they might hold the most promise for the treatment of anxiety… Despite the fact marijuana was first cultivated almost 10,000 years ago, modern medicine has yet to find another substance that can melt away our fears with such slick efficiency.
Hm. I thought it was also true that people who smoke a lot of pot get paranoid. Is there a connection?
RELATED: According to a new Rasmussen Reports poll, parents prefer pot. Fifty-one percent (51%) of American adults say alcohol is more dangerous than marijuana, and just 19% think pot is worse.
And in Esquire former Baltimore narcotics officer Neill Franklin and Esquire columnist John H. Richardson conclude that our “war on drugs” results in the needless deaths of more than 15,000 Americans each year.
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11 Responses to “Jonah Lehrer on Pot in LA”
I've heard in the past that driving a motor vehicle after having smoked pot is the equivalent of drinking and driving. Has that changed?
it's our 'drug wars' that set the precedent for so much of america's problematic relationship today with civil liberties (and spending), especially our privacy, our property, etc. this is one of the few places where, in the historical sense, i think this country is actually becoming more repressive = less free. (and always with the public's safety in mind, of course.) there are far too many of us who prefer to be comfortable rather than speaking up ensure our personal liberties in the face of their constant eroding under by the collective.
“under by”, that's priceless, ha.
I don't know that it changed, Redbus, since I doubt it was ever right. Studies of drivers under controlled conditions as well as studies of accident stats indicate pot does impair driving ability somewhat but not nearly as much as alcohol. And to the extent it does affect your abilities, it tends to make you more cautious rather than wilder behind the wheel.
Driving while high is proven to be more dangerous than sober, although at lower levels not as bad as alcohol. And trust me, am I anything BUT anti-pot! But facts are facts.
The history channel (or was it Discovery?) had an interesting documentary on the politics of pot. There was a period when Hollywood made movies showing people becoming murderous thugs after smoking pot. It was taught that way in schools, also. It wasn't until the mayor of New York did a study on the subject that the truth came out, but by then it was already illegal.
Absolutely excellent article! I cannot and will not smoke, pot or anything else, but many decades ago I did in fact smoke pot on a fairly regular basis. I must emphatically agree that anxiety is most effectively removed with a few tokes. This alone should make it legal for some people under specific conditions. On the other hand its not much of a cure for chronic over achievement.
From http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/Misc/driving/s1p2.htm:
From http://norml.org/index.cfm?Group_ID=5450:
puff puff give….
should be the only weed law
The real question that begs to be asked:
Which is safer, driving while smoking pot or driving while talking on a cell phone?
I think AT&T found that pot was more dangerous, but they may have been biased.
“Medical marijuana” and the stores in LA were the subject of a CNN story some time ago.